To celebrate five years since the publication I Love You I Hate You by Love Jozi and Johannesburg In Your Pocket, we're sharing selected essays from the book. It's a definitive work on 10 years of Joburg's history, told through 100 city-inspired T-shirts and 34 short essays by thinkers, doers, and observers. It's magnificent. Enjoy journalist Gus Silber's piece below, and buy the book here.
No Entry by Gus Silber
It was a grey, sullen, Joburg rainy Sunday as I headed out to Hillbrow to look up an old acquaintance. A pillar of the community, a towering figure, standing tall above the shove and bustle of the streets.We were close, once: when I stayed in a flat at the foot of Twist Street, I would get an eyeful whenever I drew the curtains and looked out of the window.
Beckoned by the beacon, I would hike up the hill, to go Hillbrowsing for books and records, and always, the tower would loom, amidst the jostling buildings, like a giant redwood in the forest. A guardian, a protector.
If I got too close, and looked up from the base, I would get the dizzying sensation that the sky was falling, or that I was falling into the sky, liberated at last from the gravity of the city. But it was all just an illusion, a con of the eye.
A tower, in fable, harbours a golden-haired girl, or sprouts towards the heavens from a magical seed. But this concrete edifice, I had to concede, was just a big pipe with a plug and a needle on top, and although once upon a time you could rocket through the hollow to the lookout and the revolving restaurant at the crown, its sole function now was to transmit invisible microwaves into the ether.
And yet, oddly, I found myself falling, falling, falling in love with the Hillbrow Tower.
We fetishise unloveliness in Johannesburg: Our spirit beasts are a mutant cricket, a dagger-billed bird with oily feathers and an ear-splitting cry, and a spider that scurries up the inside wall when it rains.
But there is a certain beauty in brutalism, in buildings that draw your eye to the clouds, even as they bring you right back down to earth. They serve to remind us that the real wealth of our city lies hidden below the surface, in the negative spaces, not just where the earth was clawed aside to make the mine dumps, not just in the rich golden seam of the reef, but in the heart and soul of the place, in the intimate scale of its humanity.
On this Sunday, as I took a right off Empire Road and angled up Clarendon towards Goldreich, I couldn’t see the tower at all: It had been swallowed by the mist, whipped away by the rain, smudged from the landscape like an artist’s second thought.
Still, I knew it was there, was and will always be, a cut-out against the skyline, climbing, soaring, the eternal symbol of what it means to be a Joburger: to aspire.
I Love You I Hate You
Published in 2019, I Love You I Hate You is a book about Johannesburg told in two parts. The first part is the story of Love Jozi, relayed through more than 100 T-shirt graphics. T-shirts have been one of the brand's core products since it was formed by Bradley Kirshenbaum in 2005, with the city of Johannesburg its muse – ever-inspiring bold designs, and new ways of looking.
The second feature of the book is a collection of 34 short essays by Joburg thinkers, doers, and observers that spell out a complicated relationship with the city. Travel down unexpected paths and grapple with the competing emotions of love and hate that living in Johannesburg inspires. The writers include journalists, novelists, city developers, cultural critics, academics, designers, DJs, and entrepreneurs, edited by Laurice Taitz, publisher and editor of Johannesburg In Your Pocket.
Purchase your copy of I Love You I Hate You here and get the matching T-shirt.
Save the date: Kirshenbaum will tell the funny, heartfelt, and inspiring story behind I Love You I Hate You at Design Week in Joburg on Thu, Oct 10.
Comments